massachusetts

[Miner]

public employees in illinois are covered by cigna. cigna is no longer paying claims, they are offering iou's.

 

they're paying the claims, it's just that payment is taking 3-4 months longer than usual.

[i_am_the_swammi]

How quickly we forget, or deliberately ignore because it disproves our desperate hopes.

 

 

I am sure there are a number of big companies stating that "they are considering it", so as to put more pressure on the govt as to rethink the strategy.

 

Fact is, as your article states, not one company is on record as saying they WOULD elect to pay the fines...and Verizon, after exploring the option, stated they definitely would not.

[bushwacked]

 

I am sure there are a number of big companies stating that "they are considering it", so as to put more pressure on the govt as to rethink the strategy.

 

Fact is, as your article states, not one company is on record as saying they WOULD elect to pay the fines...and Verizon, after exploring the option, stated they definitely would not.

 

 

Clearly, because four companies considered dropping health care as part of a cost/benefit analysis, by this time tomorrow health care will be nationalized, costs will skyrocket even more than without any kind of reform, and the govt. will have complete control. You are an idiot for thinking otherwise and WV and Perch were right along.

 

You see, none of this stuff would be happening and HC would be affordable for everyone, if Obama just left well enough alone. Now we are screwed. You deliberately ignore this is only because it disproves your desperate hopes.

Edited July 20, 2010 by bushwacked

[westvirginia]

Clearly, because four companies considered dropping health care as part of a cost/benefit analysis, by this time tomorrow health care will be nationalized, costs will skyrocket even more than without any kind of reform, and the govt. will have complete control. You are an idiot for thinking otherwise and WV and Perch were right along.

 

You see, none of this stuff would be happening and HC would be affordable for everyone, if Obama just left well enough alone. Now we are screwed. You deliberately ignore this is only because it disproves your desperate hopes.

 

I'm sorry your boy combines the ineptness of Carter with the corruption of Clinton. I'm sorry you're embarrassed at having voted for him and that every time you defend the indefensible, you die a little inside. Since you clearly and willfully mis-represent my arguments I'll have to spell it out for you.

 

You see, Swammi was making a judgment, little more than a WAG really, and I was disagreeing with his WAG and providing a WAG of my own. At no time have I said to leave HC alone, as your little temper tantrum would indicate. At no time have I said it's fine the way it is. In fact, I've said since the late 90's that we'd all be better off with both a) Extending the tax credit/deduction to individuals as well as businesses, and allowing insurance to be sold across state lines.

 

In fact, I wonder if that little wonder right there is the reason there IS so much bureacracy in the insurance industry (according to ursa anyway, and I don't think he'd deliberately lie). Because they have to have management and different folks in every state and some kind of structure?

 

Thank you for allowing me to enlighten you today. I hope I have lessened your ignorance and reduced your need for hyperbolic ad-homeniem attacks when you really don't have a legitimate point to argue. As has been said, better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to open your mouth and remove all doubt. Enjoy your day, sweetie-pie.

[bushwacked]

 

 

[Jimmy Neutron]

Bingo. For all the crap perch took in this thread he was right. The folks in favor of this can't be truly this idiotic to believe this bill is going to cut costs and do all the things they've been saying.

 

It's not like congress just voted to give docs the portion of medicare reimbursements that were going to be cut under the HC bill to help pay for it.

[driveby]

Faced with a barrage of bad news about the health-care system in Massachusetts, Obamacare advocates such as Jonathan Gruber, Jonathan Cohn, Ezra Klein, and Igor Volsky have started fighting back, arguing that things are going great in the Bay State. Cato’s Michael Cannon has done a great job of summarizing their arguments, and why they fall flat:

 

•The Commonwealth Fund reports that even though Massachusetts already had the highest health insurance premiums in the nation, premiums rose faster post-RomneyCare than anywhere else; 21-46 percent faster than the national average.

•A recent study estimates that RomneyCare has so far increased employer-sponsored health-insurance premiums by an average of 6 percent.

•The success that Klein sees in Massachusetts’ individual market — which accounts for just 4 percent of the private market — is merely the product of shifting costs to workers with job-based coverage.

•Contrary to Klein’s post hoc spin that RomneyCare “was never an attempt to control costs,” Romney himself promised that “the costs of health care will be reduced.”

•Aaron Yelowitz and I find evidence suggesting that uninsured Massachusetts residents are responding to the individual mandate not by obtaining coverage but by concealing their insurance status. Coverage gains may therefore be less than official estimates suggest.

•Evidence is mounting that, despite stiffer penalties than ObamaCare will impose, increasing numbers of people are gaming the individual mandate by only purchasing health insurance when they need medical care. Such behavior could ultimately cause the “private” insurance market to collapse.

Liberals like to talk about controlling health costs, but in practice, they are far less concerned about reducing costs than they are about increasing spending. Here again is Jonathan Cohn:

 

If the lesson from Massachusetts is that “genuine cost control is avoided because it’s politically difficult” then fiscal disaster is inevitable. Health care costs are going to keep rising, no matter what we do. And if that’s the case, I would certainly prefer a world in which people don’t have to worry about paying their medical bills. It doesn’t cost a lot to make that happen; the incremental cost of insuring the uninsured is a small fraction of health care spending.

 

Cohn captures a lot of what’s wrong with liberal health-care philosophy in these few sentences. “If fiscal disaster is inevitable, we might as well cover the uninsured.” Actually, the exact opposite is true. The reason why health care costs keep rising, and the reason we face fiscal disaster, is because of subsidized insurance.

 

Government programs like Medicare and Medicaid, which started out small, reward irresponsible utilization of health-care resources. As MIT economist Amy Finkelstein showed in an important paper, Medicare alone is responsible for nearly half of the health care inflation between 1950 and 1990. The reason is hardly mysterious: if you subsidize health-care spending, as Cohn recommends, you will get more of it, leading to even more health-care inflation. It’s Economics 101: if you increase demand for a product, and keep supply constant, prices will go up.

 

And, so, we end up with the death spiral of state-funded health care. As the cost of health care increases, driven there by government subsidies, fewer people can afford private insurance, leading to more cries for more government subsidies, which will drive costs up even further. Wouldn’t it be nice if we could try the opposite approach?

 

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